In his article posted yesterday in response to the Australian wildfires, Paul Krugman notes in passing an intriguing statistical fact about conservative climate change deniers. They are not, he observes (contrary to popular liberal belief) especially likely to be people lacking in scientific awareness and training. To the contrary, he cites a study in Nature showing that conservatives with high levels of scientific literacy and numeracy are more likely to deny the reality of climate change than those with little background in the subject.
This makes a perverse but comprehensible kind of sense. The fact that climate change is real is attested by the evidence of the senses, by ecological disasters that are already unfolding around us (such as Australia's wildfires), and by the headlines of any reputable newspaper. To deny it, therefore, requires a certain brilliance - the ability to mine for strange and exotic sources of quasi-information, say, or to interpret obvious data in surprising and contrarian ways.
This comports with my anecdotal observations of climate deniers I encounter on social media. At the nonprofit organization where I work, for instance, we often receive the predictable trolling responses to any posts we write related to politics and progressive social issues (which is most of our posts). The responses that come from the climate "skeptics" - unlike, say, the ones from the "MAGA" creeps who reply to posts about immigration - are often distinguished by their quixotic erudition.
Some who used to deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change at all have now shifted gears. It turns out, we are informed, that climate change may be happening, but it is actually a good thing. One of these people on Twitter was recently circulating scientific articles suggesting that higher temperatures and rising sea levels may actually increase the size of island nations, for instance, rather than submerging them gradually, etc.
I give it only a small amount of time before the negative consequences of global warming become too evident to be ignored, and the grounds of the argument will shift once again. Now, climate change will be acknowledged to be bad. But we will be told it is liberals' and environmentalists' fault. I look forward to seeing the subtle and learned ways by which such a point can be demonstrated.
(And the Krugman article shows, by the way, Australian right-wingers have already made this leap. Environmentalists didn't let them cut down enough trees to reduce the risk of out-of-control blazes, they say, and so forth.)
As Krugman notes, such twisty-turny conservative arguments often catch liberals off-guard. Most of us expect that if you deny the global scientific consensus, then you must be ill-versed in science. In reality, however, disputing such well-established truths often requires that a person become more deeply immersed in a given subject. How else are they to subvert the high priestcraft of science? How else are the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise?
To believe that climate change is real, after all, you only have to read and take seriously a single newspaper headline. To believe it is a hoax, by contrast, requires you to "not trust everything you're told." And isn't that what smart and well-informed people are supposed to do?
What this proves in brief is that clever people are vastly more skilled at spreading misconceptions and partial truths than the simple-minded. When President Trump declares that climate change is a hoax created by the Chinese, for instance, some people may take this as a completely accurate description of reality; for others, it will be red meat from which they derive some evil satisfaction having little to do with its purported truth-value. In any case, however, the claim is not likely to persuade anyone who isn't already inclined to agree with it.
To get the truly dangerous, insinuating falsehoods, by contrast - the ones that stick in people's minds and win over the unsuspecting - you need opinion-makers with the intellectual acumen to selectively cite journal articles, to seek for particles of scientific evidence that point one way and fish them out from amidst the great reservoir of publicly-accepted information all pointing in the other, and so forth.
Shakespeare's comedy Love's Labour's Lost lends further authority to the observation that the knowing are more dangerous than the ignorant in this regard. As the Princess of France remarks: None are so surely caught, when they are catch'd,/ As wit turn'd fool: folly, in wisdom hatch'd,/Hath wisdom's warrant and the help of school/ And wit's own grace to grace a learned fool.
Indeed, one of the great themes of the play is the remarkable capacity for self-delusion the highly educated possess. The four young men at the heart of the comedy manage to bind themselves with an improbably self-abnegating oath, and then to break it a few scenes later, persuading themselves all the time that each new decision is the wisest one.
Once they have decided to go back on their word, they turn to the wittiest of their members, urging him: now prove/ Our loving lawful, and our faith not torn./ O! some authority how to proceed;/ Some tricks, some quillets, how to cheat the devil.
It is in much the same spirit that conservatives turn to their learned pundits. Please, they say, give us answers and arguments by which to confound the wise and the obvious! And for this task - that of providing evidence of things contrary to fact, sense, and settled opinion - they need not ignorance, but a fund of knowledge; not slowness - but little less than genius.
So it happens that liberals are often caught flat-footed in debate, despite (or rather, because of) the fact they have all the arguments on their side. Liberals tend after all to take the morally obvious side of a question, and they know they will be arguing with people who deny the obvious. And who else would deny the obvious but the woefully misinformed? So they assume they will only need to argue with the fatuously ignorant.
To understand why this is a self-defeating assumption to make, it is helpful to have reference to Malcolm Cowley's "theory of convolutions," which he sets forth in his memoir of the Lost Generation, Exile's Return.
In its original form, the "theory of convolutions" provides an explanation for changing literary fashions among the young. It can be applied, however, to the evolution of virtually any form of intellectual contrariness.
People love to prove themselves cleverer than their parents and peers, so the theory goes, and what better way to do so than to embrace a paradoxical attitude? What happens, however, when a stance that was once deemed paradoxical has been absorbed into the received opinion of a given intellectual cohort? In order to distinguish themselves further, the would-be clever individual must now come up with a paradox with which to subvert the original paradox, and then another to subvert it, and so on. Such is the process of convolution, and it can be carried on to an indefinite number of stages.
It is plain that such a phenomenon is not confined to the literary realm. Something very similar has always been a feature of polemical life, and in the world of hyper-fast online communication, where yesterday's "hot take" has already become stale convention by this morning, we are more than capable of carrying the possibilities of convolution to logical extremes.
When they gird themselves for ideological battle with conservatives, however, liberals tend to forget all this. They underestimate their foes, therefore, to none but their own peril. They have met so many very stupid conservatives, after all, and it is those with whom they imagine they will be dealing.
They imagine this because conservatives who hold limited and simplistic views really do exist. Indeed, they are plentiful. Among any human population, there will be some who are downright, dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries. There will be people who oppose sacrificing for the less fortunate because they just don't want to be bothered. People who assume those less well off than themselves must be so because they are less worthy or capable. People who assume that members of any collectives they consider to be out-groups are grasping, lazy, dangerous, and cheating. And so forth. These are conservatives of the first convolution.
Liberals need to be aware, however, that there are also conservatives of second- and third-order convolutions as well. Conservatives who don't simply argue against social programs by saying that the poor are lazy and underserving, say, but by suggesting that social programs actually make more people poor, and therefore it is liberals who actually don't care about poor people, etc.
It is these kinds of conservatives, moreover, not those of the first convolution, who will likely show the intellectual pluck and initiative to cross swords with liberals in any public forum - including on social media. They are therefore the ones for whom liberals must strategize in advance.
Liberal housing advocates, say, know the real reasons why many people - regardless of their official political affiliations - oppose or are uncomfortable with affordable housing requirements. Very often, even among nominal liberals, the discomfort stems from some combination of racial paranoia and the fear that their own property values will take a hit if people with more modest incomes move into their neighborhood. Liberals in favor of such requirements therefore ready themselves to denounce the self-interest, greed, and racism of their opponents, and have few other weapons at their disposal.
All it takes to confound the liberals, therefore, is for just one of their conservative opponents to clamber a rung higher in the ladder of convolution. Suppose, this person says, that the liberal-backed affordable housing mandate for any new development simply makes developers less likely to build new units in the area at all. In which case, the total housing stock would be diminished. In which case, housing would actually get more expensive, and less affordable. In which case, it is actually liberals who are the enemies of affordable housing, not conservatives!
Such an argument follows a familiar pattern - indeed, it is one of the classic and most time-honored strategies of conservatives of the higher convolutions: namely, the argument from "perversity," as Albert O. Hirschman labeled it in his classic study of reactionary rhetoric. According to this trope, any effort at social betterment will only backfire upon itself, and therefore should not be attempted in the first place.
It takes prolonged exposure to conservatives of the second- and higher convolutions, however, to begin to recognize the pattern of these rhetorical moves. Seen in isolation, after all, the above argument might simply be a good-faith attempt to point out a hidden unintended flaw in an affordable housing proposal, so that the proposal might be strengthened and this danger avoided. Indeed, I'm sure the argument is actually made in such a spirit, in some cases.
It is only after one finds the same people making the same types of arguments about the same types of proposals so many times, however, and never offering any better proposals for purposive social action to put in their place, that one begins to suspect we are in the realm of rationalization, and that in actual fact people are making these arguments because they never wanted the social programs to succeed in the first place, or the underlying social inequities to be addressed.
We need to understand and be able to predict the arrival of such patterns of convoluted arguments, and thereby to be able to discern their true motives, and recognize them for what they are.
My fear is that currently, the climate movement has grown too complacent in its arguments, precisely because it expects to only ever be arguing with conservatives of the first convolution. This is because we are faced - in the person of our current president - with one of the least convoluted conservatives to ever hold office. Our ability to argue with clever conservatives is atrophying fast, in a world where the leader of the whole U.S. conservative movement right now simply denies scientific evidence, tries to purge any mention of it from administrative agencies, openly says racist and cruel and sexist and bullying things, defends war crimes, etc.
In a strange way, therefore, Trump makes it too easy for us. It is facile to point out the flaws in an argument that marshals no evidence in its favor, that buries its head in the sand, that does not rely on any established canons of fact, reason, or interpretation.
As future administrations succeed Trump's, however, and as the evidence of climate change becomes ever more unmistakable, we are likely to begin to encounter more ingenious forms of climate denialism. The denialists seeking power are going to mount to higher levels of convolution. It will turn out that climate change may be real, but EPA regulations somehow exacerbate it. That the seas may be boiling, but that labor protections caused it.
It's hard to say exactly what form these arguments will take. I am not clever enough, I fear, to be a conservative pundit. I am confined by my limited intellect to the realms of the factual and evidence-based. But I know that such arguments are on the way. And we should do our best to be prepared.
No comments:
Post a Comment